Tod Allman presents a paper at the 13th National Natural Language Processing Research Symposium.

Tod Allman presented a paper entitled "An Analysis of the Required Modifications when Converting a Computational Tagalog Grammar into an Ayta Mag-Indi Grammar" at the 13th National Natural Language Processing Research Symposium held at the University of the Immaculate Conception in Davao, Philippines. The paper described how the Tagalog lexicon and grammar were modified to accommodate Ayta Mag-Indi, another Malayo-Polynesian language spoken in the Philippines.

Jeremiah Chung represents TBTA at a missions conference in Europe.

Jeremiah Chung represented TBTA at a missions conference in Europe that explored new techniques for applying technology to missions. More than 400 people representing over 100 missions organizations attended the conference. Each organization was invited to give a one minute presentation describing their mission, and Jeremiah's presentation won first place. You can see a video of his presentation by clicking the button below.

TBTA's First Fruit

Tod Allman and Ephraim Rey spent approximately two years developing a Tagalog lexicon and grammar. They began by working through the book of Ruth, then Esther, five chapters of Luke, the first half of Daniel, and they hope to finish Genesis by the end of this year. Ephraim edited the computer generated draft of Ruth in order to make it publishable, and then they put the text into the pictures provided by Free Illustrated Bible. We had 500 copies printed, and we're excited to begin distributing them at orphanages, special schools, churches, and prisons. We know that Ruth is a small book and will probably not lead anyone to Christ directly, but this is just the beginning. We hope to produce many more books of the Bible in Tagalog and the other languages spoken in the Philippines.

Tod Allman presents a paper and demonstrates Linguist's Assistant at the 12th National Natural Language Processing Research Symposium.

Tod Allman presented a paper entitled "Linguist's Assistant: Modifying a Tagalog Lexicon and Grammar to Accommodate Ayta Mag-Indi" at the 12th National Natural Language Processing Research Symposium held at Silliman Univerity in
Dumaguete, Philippines. The paper demonstrated how the Tagalog lexicon and grammar can easily be modified to produce high quality translations in Ayta Mag-Indi, another Malayo-Polynesian language spoken in the Philippines. The workshop showed the participants how to modify the Ayta Mag-Indi grammar to produce Tagalog texts.

Matthew Rodatus represents TBTA at the Code for the Kingdom Hackathon in Denver, Colorado.

Matthew Rodatus represented TBTA at a "hackathon" hosted by Code for the Kingdom. "Hackathons" are events where computer scientists gather to develop computer programs designed for advancing God’s kingdom. At the beginning of this conference, project members were given an opportunity to present their work proposals, and then unaffiliated programmers selected a particular team and helped develop their project. TBTA attracted several top-notch programmers and designers. They developed a new, up-to-date interface for building our semantic representations - the unambiguous representations of the Bible's message that our software uses as the starting point to accurately translate the Bible. At the end of the conference, each team had an opportunity to present their project and the work they did during the hackathon weekend. Then a panel of judges evaluated the projects, and TBTA's team won the best overall project started at the hackathon. You can read more about the Hackathon at their website: http://codeforthekingdom.org/denver-hackathon-2015.html.

Matthew Rodatus joins TBTA as a Software Consultant.

Matthew has been a professional software engineer for over ten years. Though he hasn't studied linguistics formally, he loves linguistics and worked for many years with Dr. Stephen Beale on natural language processing. He received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science in 2006, and immediately took a job at Microsoft in Redmond, WA. After a successful time there, he returned to Frederick, MD where he resides with his wife and two daughters, and works as a Senior Software Engineer for a local software company. Matthew is enthusiastic about working on the team engineering the TBTA software, and he looks forward to learning more linguistics along the way and helping in the TBTA mission in any way he can. Matthew wants to see the whole Bible translated accurately into the thousands of languages that don't have it so that every culture can see the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6) -- in their native tongue.

Dr. Jeremiah Chung joins TBTA as a Consultant.

Jeremiah Chung has served with Wycliffe Bible Translators - Hong Kong for more than twenty years. He guided a team of mother-tongue translators on Santo Island in the South Pacific, and they translated the New Testament into Merei. Jeremiah's vision is now to re-engineer the Bible translation process using the latest technology available, and to engage the laity, particularly Asian diaspora. He will be developing both formal and informal relationships between TBTA and other organizations and schools interested in Bible translation. Jeremiah has been seconded from Wycliffe Bible Translators to TBTA for one year beginning in May, 2015.

Tod Allman presents a paper and demonstrates Linguist's Assistant at the 11th National Natural Language Processing Research Symposium.

Tod Allman presented a paper entitled "Linguist's Assistant: Gleaning a Tagalog Lexicon and Grammar
from a Small, Lightly Annotated Corpus" at the 11th National Natural Language Processing Research Symposium held at National Univerity in
Manila. The paper demonstrated the progress being made with the Tagalog grammar, and also presented the results of experiments that have been performed to determine the quality of the Tagalog translations produced by LA. The experiments indicate that when experienced mother-tongue translators use the computer generated translation, their productivity is more than tripled without any loss of quality.

Tod Allman presented a paper entitled "Linguist's Assistant: Gleaning Malayo-Polynesian Grammars
from Small, Lightly Annotated Corpora" at the 12th Philippine Linguistics Congress held at the Univerity of the
Philippines in Diliman. The paper demonstrated a new technique we've developed to very rapidly glean substantial
portions of a target language's grammar from lightly annotated translations of sample sentences. This new technique
significantly reduces the amount of time and effort required to develop a grammar for a language.

Tod Allman and his family move to the Philippines.

Tod and his family moved to Manila for a three year term so that he could develop lexicons and grammars for several of the languages there. He hopes to use TBTA's software to generate initial draft translations of parts of the Bible in as many languages as possible.

Stephen Beale presents a paper at the 52nd annual meeting of the Association for Compuational Linguistics (ACL).

Stephen Beale recently attended the ACL workshop, "ComeputEL: The use of computational methods in the study of endangered languages." Researchers from the fields of Linguistics and Computational Linguistics met to discuss new strategies and computational tools that could help endangered languages. His paper, "Time to Change the 'D' in 'DEL'" discussed the importance and benefit of a deeper description of these languages as opposed to the more widespread practice of primarily data-oriented recordings and transcriptions of texts. He demonstrated how Linguist's Assistant can be used to grammatically and morphologically describe languages in an efficient manner.

Tod Allman teaches a class at De La Salle University in the Philippines.

Tod Allman and his family are in the Philippines for four months (January through April, 2014). Tod is teaching graduate computer science students how to use LA, and is also working with several linguistics students to build lexicons and grammars in LA for two languages spoken in the Philippines. He presented a paper entitled "Toward an Optimal Multilingual Natural Language Generator: Deep Source Analysis and Shallow Target Analysis" at the 10th National Natural Language Processing Research Symposium (10th NNLPRS), and another paper entitled "Linguist's Assistant: In Search of the Source" at the 14th Philippine Computing Science Congress (PCSC '14). He will be presenting a four day workshop to linguistics students at the Univerity of the Philippines in Diliman so that they will be able to use LA to document several languages during their field projects. We hope these projects will provide a platform for describing many more languages spoken in the Philippines.

Tod Allman teaches a class at GIAL.

Tod Allman is teaching a class at the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics (GIAL), a school founded by members of Wycliffe Bible Translators to prepare students for cross cultural ministries, particularly Bible translation. One of the students wrote an insightful description of how TBTA works in his blog, which you can see here.

Steve Beale teaches two classes at De La Salle University in the Philippines.

Stephen Beale and his family are in the Philippines for three months. Steve is teaching two classes at De La Salle University, and is also leading several projects related to TBTA. He is teaching computer science students about TBTA, and leading them in a project to redesign, improve, and help make it better suited for the languages spoken in the Philippines. Steve is also working with seven linguistic students to document several languages spoken in the Philippines using TBTA. We hope these projects will serve as a springboard for describing many more languages.

Richard Denton completes the semantic analysis of Ephesians.

Richard completed the semantic analysis of Ephesians, so we now have semantic representations for Genesis, Ruth, Esther, Daniel, Nahum, Luke, Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians, and we're making good progress in Acts, 1 Thessalonians, and Joshua.

Richard Denton completes the semantic analysis of Colossians.

Richard completed the semantic analysis of Colossians, so we now have semantic representations for Genesis, Ruth, Esther, Daniel, Nahum, Luke, Philippians, and Colossians. Other than the Psalms and Proverbs, the Pauline epistles are the most difficult books to analyze, so we're very thankful that Richard is making good progress with this crucial work.

Tod Allman represents TBTA Inc. at Urbana.

Once every three years Intervarsity organizes a large missions conference called Urbana, and this year's conference was in St. Louis, Missouri. Approximately sixteen thousand people attendend the conference. Tod served as a representative of TBTA, and met many people who are interested in TBTA's work and mission.

Stephen Beale and Tod Allman teach an online class at De La Salle University in Manila, Philippines.

Steve and Tod are team-teaching a graduate class in the computational linguistics department at De La Salle University. The purpose of the class is to teach the students how to use Linguist's Assistant to document minority languages. We're hoping that eventually these students will use Linguist's Assistant to document many of the 171 languages spoken in the Philippines.

Stephen Beale teaches a class at UMBC.

Steve is teaching a class at the University of Maryland that introduces honors students to principles in linguistic fieldword. As part of the class students will be learning to use Linguist's Assistant.

Tod Allman teaches a class at GIAL.

Tod is teaching a class about TBTA at the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics (GIAL). The purpose of GIAL is to prepare students for cross cultural ministries, particularly Bible translation. This class teaches students how to use TBTA in their translation projects.

Tod presented a paper at International Natural Language Generation 2012 entitled "Linguist's Assistant: A Multilingual Natural Language Generator based on Linguistic Universals, Typologies, and Primitives." Stephen Beale and Richard Denton were co-authors. Tod also gave a demonstration of LA to many participants at the conference.

Stephen Beale spends most of March in the Philippines.

Stephen spent most of March in the Philippines as a visiting professor at three universities. He gave numerous lectures, demonstrations, and tutorials about Linguist's Assistant (LA) to faculty members and students. De La Salle University is now planning to offer an on-line course so that its students can learn how to use LA in their computational linguistics courses. That course will be very similar to the course developed for GIAL by Tod Allman.

Tod Allman becomes an adjunct faculty member at GIAL.

The Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics (GIAL) is a graduate school developed jointly by Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Summer Institute of Linguistics. GIAL's primary purpose is to train students for cross cultural Bible translation. On August 26th, 2011 Tod met with the Dean and several faculty members at GIAL and gave a presentation of TBTA. Tod then proposed a new course so that the students at GIAL could learn how to use TBTA in their translation projects. Later the faculty and administration approved the course, and it will be offered in the fall of 2012.

Stephen lead a day-long tutorial at the International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing in Chiang Mai,Thailand. He taught translators and natural language processing scientists the basics of Linguist's Assistant (LA). He also presented an academic paper (jointly authored with Tod) about LA/TBTA at the conference and lead a demonstration session where the conference participants saw LA in use.

Richard Denton featured in The Ivy League Christian Observer.

Richard gave a demonstration of TBTA to the Christian faculty and students at Dartmouth College. Later a reporter from The Ivy League Christian Observer wrote an article about Richard's work. That article appeared in the fall issue and can be seen on page 23.

Stephen Beale teaches a class at UMBC using Linguist's Assistant.

Stephen began teaching an Honor's College course at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County which is centered around Linguist's Assistant (LA). LA is the "secular" version of TBTA which is used for academic purposes. Twenty-five students are taking the class which is oriented towards studying and describing endangered languages.

Prior to working in Philippians, our semantic analysis had dealt with only the narrative portions of the Bible, and we weren't certain whether or not semantic representations could be developed for the expository portions, particularly the Pauline epistles. But our work in Philippians demonstrates that TBTA can be used to help translate the expository portions of the Bible into many different languages.